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Kueyoung is a Churchill Scholar at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, where he is pursuing an MPhil in Physics in the group of Prof. Richard Friend. He graduated summa cum laude (4.0 GPA) from Penn State with honors in chemistry where he worked with Prof. Lauren Zarzar on using emulsions as an dynamic and responsive materials platform.
Through his interdisciplinary research projects ranging from using mechanical force to drive organic reactions to modeling photosynthetic energy transport with DNA origami, he has had the opportunity to join diverse scientific communities across the world, including at the University of Pennsylvania, UC Berkeley, the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, and MIT. He has authored two first-author publications and received multiple awards for his work at local and national conferences. With the goal of harnessing materials to address problems in sustainability during his research career as a professor, he is determined to apply his collaborative mindset and ceaseless curiosity at the intersection of chemistry, physics, and biology.
Outside of the lab, Kueyoung organizes science outreach for local K12 students and served as the President of the Eberly College of Science’s student ambassador organization. In his free time, you can find Kueyoung lumbering through his (admittedly daunting) stack of "to be read" literary fiction, lifting heavy objects for fun in the gym, and agonizing over his coffee-brewing technique.
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Memory effects in active droplets
Q. Le*, K. Kim*, B. Khaer, L. D. Zarzar #, submitted
Abstract: Marangoni-driven self-propelled droplets have attracted considerable attention as a platform to study
active soft matter and collective behavior. The speed of active drops is generally assumed to be
determined by instantaneous diameter and solubilization rate, which together dictate the spontaneously
generated interfacial tension gradients across the drop surface and induce propulsion; the history of the
droplet has not before been considered. Here, we report that active droplets can exhibit a type of memory
wherein the temporal history of the droplet, particularly the starting diameter, influences the droplet
speed...
Chemical programming of solubilizing, non-equilibrium active droplets
K. Kim, R. Balaj, L. D. Zarzar #, Accounts of Chemical Research
Abstract: The multifunctionality and resilience of living systems has
inspired an explosion of interest in creating materials with life-like properties.
Just as life persists out-of-equilibrium, we too should try to design materials
that are thermodynamically unstable but can be harnessed to achieve
desirable, adaptive behaviors...
Liquid-liquid surfactant partitioning drives dewetting of oil from hydrophobic surfaces
K. Kim*, W. Xue*, L. D. Zarzar #, Journal of Colloid and Interface Science
Abstract: Sessile droplets solubilizing in surfactant solution are frequently encountered in practice, but the
factors governing their non-equilibrium dynamics are not well understood. Here, we investigate mechanisms by
which solubilizing, sessile oil droplets in aqueous surfactant solution dewet from hydrophobic substrates and
spread on hydrophilic substrates...
* equal contribution, # corresponding author
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